We’d all been drinking, and we always drank way too much, like it was something we were just supposed to do. The cult of excess: drink and drugs, sex and love, pride and envy and revenge. Nothing in moderation.”

“In New York,” Jacaranda said. The Drinking Problem Jacaranda had a drinking problem. It seemed to have crept up on her at about the same time Max did. Not that it was Max’s fault, perhaps. Anyway, writers all had drinking problems in the twentieth century, and once she got the $1,080 check, she was obviously a writer and it was obviously the

I had a fantasy of myself drinking just then, not drinking in the sophisticated, martini-glass sense but in the raging, obliterating sense, drinking to get drunk, drinking in order to yield to that rebellious urge and show everyone in the room just how angry I was, just how out of place I felt, just how self-destructive I could be in response.